Fall Arts Guide

Art

The Black Panthers Continue to Expose America’s Racial Divide

Like many American icons — P.T. Barnum, Andy Warhol, Ronald Reagan — the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense got its start through a bit of flimflam. Huey Newton, an ex-con and self-taught radical intellectual, and Bobby Seale, foreman of an Oakland, California, anti-poverty youth program, founded the party in October 1966. The fledgling organization needed cash to build membership, and Newton hit upon the idea of selling copies of Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book at a San Francisco protest against the Vietnam War. By buying the books in wholesale lots from a Chinese bookstore, the budding revolutionaries realized a 400 percent profit. “That was our first fundraiser,” Seale said later. “We had not even read this book.”

Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, a fiftieth-anniversary collection of photographs, graphics, and reminiscences.

College student Stephen Shames photographed Seale hawking the tiny volume — “Get your ‘Red Book’! One dollar! The thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse-tung!” — and the two have remained colleagues ever since, most recently collaborating on

Seale (born 1936) and Newton (1942–89) used their big markup on the Communist bestseller to rent office space, install telephones, and buy shotguns, which they used to “police the police.” The Panthers’ initial program consisted of following members of the overwhelmingly white Oakland police force around predominantly black neighborhoods to guard against police brutality. As Newton told an interviewer in 1968, “In America, black people are treated very much like the Vietnamese people or any other colonized people because we’re used, we’re brutalized by the police in our community.”

A number of Shames’s photos in Power to the People feature heavily armed, sharply dressed Panthers standing outside party offices or government buildings, where they had gone to demand equal rights. As Seale remembers in the book, “I saw Huey one day. He didn’t know what he had on. A sporty leather jacket, black slacks, nice blue shirt. He’s walking down the street. I say, ‘Hold it, Huey,’ just like a director.” That street encounter, plus a movie Seale saw featuring the black berets worn by French resistance fighters in World War II, resulted in a party uniform that added a stylish swagger to the Panthers’ revolutionary front.

Peppered throughout the book are streetwise graphics by Emory Douglas, the Panthers’ Minister of Culture, who designed the party’s newspaper. The June 27, 1970, issue of The Black Panther features “Warning to America,” a drawing of an African-American woman hefting an automatic rifle under the headline, “We are armed, and we are conscious of our situation, and we are determined to change it, and we are unafraid.” (Shames’s photos, a selection of Douglas’s graphics, and copies of The Black Panther are on display at Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea through October 29.)

Shames includes an excerpt from Newton’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide: “I constantly felt uncomfortable and ashamed of being black,” he wrote. “During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience.... All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.” Newton was functionally illiterate after graduating from school, and taught himself to read as an adult by working through Plato’s Republic; he went on to study law with Edwin Meese, who eventually became President Reagan’s retrograde attorney general.

Meese later observed, “I was teaching law, criminal law, for police officers and people who wanted to be police officers and one of the students in my class was Huey Newton. He later wrote in his book that he was taking these law enforcement courses because he wanted ‘to know as much as the pigs knew.’ “ Meese recalled, “In the middle of the course, one day he asked if he could ride to the courthouse with me.... Well, it turned out actually he was on trial. He had stabbed someone with a steak knife at a barbecue some months before.” After serving a year for assault with a deadly weapon, Newton returned to Meese’s class while on parole, and earned an A.

Newton schooled the party members in both constitutional and local California law, making sure they carried law books containing the relevant statutes whenever they went on armed patrols. Power to the People exposes the pretzel logic that still governs America’s racial divide, pointing out that in 1967, Reagan, at that time the governor of California, signed a very strict gun-control law after the Panthers began toting rifles and pistols in public. Seale notes in the book, “The NRA wanted us arrested for carrying guns back in those days. Yes, they did.” Shames adds, “The National Rifle Association did not utter a peep of Second Amendment protest. Can you imagine what they would say if President Obama proposed a [similar law] today?”

But while stories about armed black men marching through California’s state assembly building were making nationwide headlines, the Panthers were also creating programs based on Newton’s and Seale’s ten-point platform demanding job opportunities, better public education, increased access to healthcare, prison and judicial reform, and other improvements in the lives of black citizens. The Panthers struck a balance between Malcolm X’s black separatism and Martin Luther King’s pacifism (they admired both leaders greatly). As Seale puts it in the book, “I can understand the difference between a white left radical who stands up for my constitutional rights and some goddamn racist Ku Klux Klan who wants to murder me.”

Shames (who is white) documented numerous multiracial “Free Huey” rallies when the Panther co-founder was on trial in 1968 for the killing of a police officer. (After Newton was convicted, two drunken Oakland police officers fired shots through the plate glass window of the Panthers’ office; they were later dismissed from the force. One of Shames’s iconic photos captures the bullet holes rending a poster of Newton sitting in a wicker chair holding a spear and gun. One can only imagine the reaction of the two former cops when the conviction was reversed on appeal and, after two subsequent hung juries, Newton was released in 1970.) Shames also photographed a massive funeral for party member George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother, a collection of letters condemning brutality and racism in the prison system. Jackson was killed during a 1971 prison break.

The Panthers were perpetually in the crosshairs of local and federal authorities. A December 1970 copy of the party newspaper features a portrait of Chicago leader Fred Hampton surrounded by black chevrons, with party slogans in red — “You can jail a revolutionary but you can’t jail the revolution” — along with an epitaph of sorts: “Born August 30, 1948, Murdered by Fascist Pigs December 4, 1969.” None of the officers who raided Hampton’s apartment at 4:45 a.m. were charged with murder for shooting the unarmed Panther leader multiple times in the head, but his family and that of another victim won a massive $1.85 million settlement from the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government in a wrongful-death suit, in part because it emerged that Hampton had been drugged by an agent provocateur directed by FBI COINTELPRO operatives.

Even non–party members were harassed. Power to the People recounts how the FBI tailed the man who’d volunteered to do the plumbing at the George Jackson People’s Free Medical Clinic. “God, they wasted millions of dollars following innocent people around,” Dr. Tolbert Small remembers. The Panthers’ medical facilities were some of the first in the nation to routinely screen patients for sickle cell anemia, and they provided free STD screening for local youths as well. Shames also photographed members distributing free food and clothing in poor neighborhoods. One shot captures party member Leonard Colar, big as a linebacker and natty in a double-breasted overcoat, escorting an elderly woman on a grocery shopping trip, as part of the Panthers’ SAFE Club that accompanied seniors to cash checks and buy food in high-crime areas.

The book’s oral histories (which elide time periods by mixing quotes from the deceased with current conversations) point out that the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program provided a template for school breakfast and lunch programs today, and that the Panthers’ police patrols eventually evolved into civilian-review boards and what we now consider community policing. And for all their machismo, the Panthers were open to women in their ranks. A former leader, Ericka Huggins, notes in the book, “Part of the legacy of the Black Panther Party is that we were not afraid to look at race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. All of it. Huey wrote in support of the woman’s movement and the gay liberation movement. Who the heck — what black man, what white man, what any man was talking like that in 1970?”

Shames often composed portraits to include telling background details. A photograph of Eldridge Cleaver, taken in 1968 when he was running for president representing the Peace and Freedom Party, is dominated by a huge banner behind the Panthers’ Minister of Information’s head, reading, “Don’t Vote for Shit.” (The electorate took him at his word: He received 0.05 percent of the vote.) And despite the perils of their endeavor, the party founders retained a sense of humor. Toward the end of the book, Shames includes a four-frame sequence in which Newton and Seale stare at the lens with steely gravitas, glare at each other, and then begin cracking up before the camera pulls back as they double over with laughter.

The book closes with a litany of current concerns that echo the Panthers’ original ten-point program: a justice system that remains stacked against the poor, galloping wealth inequality, shadowy oligarchs pouring money into the electoral process, a tax system that favors the wealthiest 1 percent of citizens, racial disparities in employment and education, banks that redline minorities out of homeownership. And of course, the continued killings of unarmed black men and youths by police, which has given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. The Panthers were canny in their ability to turn protest into publicity, forcing issues that too many Americans wanted to ignore — police brutality, institutionalized racism — beyond the pages of the party’s own newspaper and into the mainstream media. It fell to BLM to update the imagery of outrage by using social media, via instantaneous cellphone uploads so different from the laborious process of shooting and developing film in Shames’s day.

One double-page photo (taken in Brooklyn circa 1970–71) captures a rubble-strewn lot hard against a crumbling brick wall spray-painted with the phrase “THE MOON BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE!!!” Is this a cry against the millions spent in 1969 to land a man on the moon even as some American children went to bed hungry, or a joyful outburst that finally there was something all Americans could share equally?

Outmanned and outgunned, the Panthers stood their ground, and paid a fearsome price, but they remained steadfast in the belief that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is the birthright of all Americans. That wasn’t true for slaves when those words were written in 1776, and they remain unattainable for many of their descendants — and for too many of the 99 percent of any color. Seale and Shames remind us that progress has been made but that true equality can still feel as distant as the lunar surface.

Power to the People: The World of the Black PanthersBy Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale256 pp., Abrams, $40

‘Power to the People: The Black Panthers in Photographs by Stephen Shames and Graphics by Emory Douglas’Steven Kasher Gallery 515 West 26th Street, 212-966-3978stevenkasher.com. Through October 29

Critic’s Pick: Hard Work

Few artists are as right on as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who in her five-decade-plus career has created a generous and muscular body of work of performances, interventions, and other projects that have dealt swift, sharp blows to the systems and frameworks imposed on art and culture by capitalism. In 1968, after giving birth to her first child, a daughter, she began to divide her attention (happily, it must be noted) between motherhood and her art practice. Rather than see herself, as so many female artists did, as failing the call of the avant-garde, she remapped its margins, recognizing that all her labors — both in the studio and in the home — were efforts made to support and preserve life’s forward momentum, its future. (“Mark [Rothko] didn’t change diapers,” she once quipped.) The following year, Ukeles wrote one of the great texts on art and labor, Manifesto! Maintenance Art: Proposal for an Exhibition “Care,” in which she argued that maintenance work — the largely unseen labor that’s neither flashy nor fun nor well paid — is necessary, and therefore should be made visible and considered vital. “After the revolution,” she offered by way of example, “who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” For her groundbreaking “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day,” she photographed three hundred office maintenance workers, asking them to think of their work as art for one hour of a day. This led to Ukeles becoming the first and only artist-in-residence for New York’s Department of Sanitation, an unpaid position she still holds today. With the Queens Museum’s “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art” (through February 19, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, queensmuseum.org), Ukeles gets her very first (and long-overdue) retrospective, one that — in the artist’s own words — promises to “keep the contemporaryart­museum groovy keep the homefires burning.” — Jennifer Krasinski

Fall Art Listings

“Patience, dear, patience.” Such was the advice the painter Carmen Herrera gave when asked in June to lend wisdom to young artists. She should know: She sold her first painting at the age of 89. Now, at 101, Herrera has landed a solo show at the Whitney, her first New York museum exhibition in almost twenty years. This modest survey of around fifty works examines how the Cuban-born hard-edge painter arrived at her rigid mature style, focusing particularly on the years 1948–1978. One especially noteworthy section looks at her time in Paris and includes works that have never before been publicly exhibited. — Pac Pobric

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It is a shame that so few painters are colorists on the order of Cecily Brown, but perhaps that’s for the best. She deserves special standing among her peers for paintings that, at their finest, are an embarrassment of chromatic riches. But Brown’s drawings are less familiar, and this show at the Drawing Center is the first to focus on them. What, exactly, does a great colorist do in a medium where color is ancillary? In the first place, she (or perhaps the curators) cheats a bit and expands the definition of drawing: A number of the eighty works in this exhibition are actually watercolors. — Pac Pobric

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The painter Agnes Martin had a spare aesthetic. She made her abstract pictures with muted colors (blue, gray, dusty orange) across grids on perfectly square canvases. For much of her career, she was labeled a minimalist, but at heart, she was a mystic. She felt herself to be an abstract expressionist and considered her grids to be inscrutable. “Take beauty,” she once said. “It’s a very mysterious thing, isn’t it?” Depending on your disposition, the mystery will either deepen or come into focus at this first full retrospective of Martin’s art since her death in 2004. It presents 110 works, including her only completed film, which follows a child as he wanders from the mountains to the sea. — Pac Pobric

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Valentin de Boulogne is poorly known today, but among his seventeenth-century contemporaries in Rome, he was widely respected. This French follower of Caravaggio, who inherited the Italian master’s emphatic realism, was adept in a range of subjects, from everyday scenes of musicians and cardsharps to contemplative depictions of saints and martyrs. Because he died so young (he was only 41) and so few of his paintings survive (around sixty in total), it is difficult to see his art in depth; this Metropolitan show brings together 45 of his existing pictures, including, remarkably, every one that belongs to the Louvre in Paris. — Pac Pobric

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Five hundred years ago in October, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, demanding to know why church authorities were accepting fees for absolving parishioners of temporal sins. Theologically, the act was groundbreaking, but it would likely have been a local affair had it not been for the advent of then-novel media like the printing press, which allowed Luther and his followers to spread their message. Through ninety objects including paintings and manuscripts (one highlight is a draft of Luther’s translation of the Old Testament), this show looks at how that message made it across Europe. — Pac Pobric

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Max Beckmann was 66 years old in the closing days of 1950 when he left his home on the Upper West Side and headed across town to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see its installation of one of his paintings — a self-portrait completed earlier that year. Beckmann, unfortunately, never made it to the museum: At 69th Street and Central Park West, he was struck down by a heart attack. The end of his life helped inspire this show, which looks at fourteen pictures that Beckmann made after settling in New York in 1949 (including that tangentially fatal self-portrait), along with 25 works made prior to the move. — Pac Pobric

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In certain circles — among the youngest of artists, in particular — the British post-conceptualist Mark Leckey holds deep sway. Leckey builds inroads between cultures, as with his short film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which documents dance in British discothèques from the Seventies through the Nineties, or with another of his shorts, Made in ‘Eaven, in which he digitally rendered a Jeff Koons balloon-bunny sculpture and transferred the images to film. The comprehensive exhibition will provide a deeper sense of his practice and also a look into his latest stirrings, made especially for the show. — Pac Pobric

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Like any form with a long tradition, portraiture is in constant need of reinvention. Kerry James Marshall, one of our most gifted painters, has long been up to the task. For 35 years, he has been updating old ideas; one of his pictures references Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors in a black hair salon. That Marshall focuses on black subjects is especially important: As he says, there simply aren’t enough of them in museums. At the Met Breuer’s essential retrospective, eighty of his works will be shown, along with forty contextualizing items the artist has plucked from the museum’s collection. — Pac Pobric

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“Pixel Forest” is an apt title for this survey of Pipilotti Rist’s work: Often, the Swiss artist surrounds audiences with giant video projections on all sides, inviting gallery-goers to take a seat and consider flowers, rivers, or fields of green. But she is no sentimentalist; her videos tend to make nature abstract — pixelate it, perhaps — so that technology also plays a heavy role. This exhibition examines thirty years’ worth of work, beginning with her early, single-channel videos of the Eighties. It also features, notably, a new installation, created on the occasion of the show. — Pac Pobric

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In February, twenty-one artists aged nineteen to eighty got together at the New York Academy of Art for a nude life-drawing class. Their subject was Iggy Pop, who stripped down and bared all for his audience. The session was conceptualized by the British artist Jeremy Deller, who said of his idea that Pop’s “body has witnessed much and should be documented.” The drawings that resulted from the class, which were made by students, practicing artists, and retirees, go on view this fall at the Brooklyn Museum. — Pac Pobric

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There are 1,590 framed items and nineteen found objects in Hanne Darboven’s monumental installation Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983. They include German newspaper clippings from the era of Nazism, propaganda posters from the Russian Revolution, and black-and-white photographs of various New York doorways. The narrative of the work is appropriately wide-ranging, covering everything from the history of media and printmaking to the development of industry in Europe. Like much of Darboven’s art, it is rarely seen in the U.S., and this reinstallation of work affords American audiences a chance to see it for the first time in over a decade. — Pac Pobric

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Francis Picabia was a famously nimble artist. Early in his career, he was an impressionist in the style of Alfred Sisley; then be became bored and morphed into a cubist, then a dadaist, later a surrealist, and eventually, finally, with a late group of naturalistic paintings, a seeming anti-modernist altogether. The name of the show is a direct quote from the artist and speaks to the many -isms of this exhibition (the first major show of Picabia’s work in the U.S.), which will be considered through well over a hundred works of art and a selection of printed archival materials. — Pac Pobric

Dance

Critic’s Pick: Dream Teams

John Jasperse, who’s shown his crafty, enigmatic dances at BAM since 2000, returns to the Next Wave Festival with Remains(September 21–24, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, bam.org), an hour-long piece that references both his thirty-year career as one of the bravest, brightest, most engaged choreographers working today and his vision for the future. He recognizes that “the past comes to us” and that dance leaves very little behind. Drawing from powerful images in the Western canon of visual art — the Madonna and Child, the lounging nude, women in wartime as victims of rape — he wrestles with issues of ego and of pedigree, seeking and finding his spot in our multicultural, postcolonial scene. Following Jasperse into the Harvey is Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group, with their brand-new Citizen (December 14–17). The nearby Howard Gilman Opera House (30 Lafayette Avenue) offers Shen Wei Dance Arts’ Neither, to music by Morton Feldman (October 5–8); Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s new Vortex Temporum, with roving musicians from Ictus (October 14–15); Rules of the Game, a collaboration among Jonah Bokaer, Daniel Arsham, and Pharrell Williams that promises to mobilize a whole lot of ping-pong balls (November 10–12); and of course Mark Morris’s modern Christmas classic, The Hard Nut (December 10–18). And at the smaller, more flexible BAM Fisher (321 Ashland Place), look for cutting-edge work by Kyle Abraham (November 2–5), Faye Driscoll (November 16–19), and Zvi Gotheiner (November 30–December 3). — Elizabeth Zimmer

Fall Dance Listings

The title of Jennifer Monson’s nonprofit is an acronym for “Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance.” She and her collaborators, who this season include ten artists she’s worked with since 1983, plan to destabilize the familiar, test new ground, define difference, and create a shared practice; she’s looking to discover how movement, sound, and image illuminate “perceptual, philosophical, and social constructs in our current political and aesthetic contexts.” One thing’s for sure: Every performance in this two-week run of her project in tow will be different. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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A Mexican trained in Mayan ritual dances, acrobatics, and contemporary ballet technique, Javier Dzul has performed with the Martha Graham Dance Company, Ailey Rep, and other troupes. The world premiere of his Rites of Passage, part of Hispanic Heritage Month, features his ensemble of dancers, aerialists, and contortionists, masked and painted by Darrell Thorne and joined by former Limon dancer Kurt Douglas and former Cirque soloist Anna Venizelos. The Friday show, at 11 a.m., is a free preview featuring excerpts from the complete work followed by a Q&A; Saturday brings the premiere proper. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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Rarely will you see so many fine dancers do so little to such powerful effect as in Maria Hassabi’s new Staged. The award-winning choreographer, a native of Cyprus with a degree from CalArts and a long catalog of presentations in museums, interrogates the relation of the body to the still image. A coproduction of the Kitchen and the French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line Festival, Staged deploys Simon Courchel, Hristoula Harakas, Molly Lieber, and Oisín Monaghan to perform simultaneous solos, together composing a living sculpture. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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The little ballet company that could commemorates its new home at St. Mark’s Church with a premiere by Antonia Franceschi, to music by Claire Van Kampen. Completing the bill Thursday and Saturday are dances by Jerome Robbins, Zhong-Jing Fang and Steven Melendez (to Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes, played live by the twelve-member percussion ensemble NYU Steel), and Pam Tanowitz. On Friday, the Diana Byer Legacy Celebration marks the seventieth birthday of NYTB’s founder with a party in the church’s garden; a performance featuring choreography by Franceschi, Antony Tudor, Keith Michael, David Parker, Gemma Bond, Alexandra Damiani, Marco Pelle, and Richard Alston; and dancing, until midnight, with DJ Imogene Strauss. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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An autobiographical duet by and about ballerina/martial artist Honji Wang (born and raised in Germany by Korean parents) and B-boy Sébastien Ramirez (a Frenchman with Spanish and Catalan parents), Monchichi combines hip-hop with tanztheater, and choreography with language and a synth-heavy score. Veterans of Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour, the pair already brought this piece to Jacob’s Pillow and the American Dance Festival in 2015, before making this Next Wave debut. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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Working in a genre known for ephemerality, the Danspace Project has for a decade mounted annual platforms celebrating aspects of the downtown scene that help solidify its history. This year’s undertaking, six weeks long and curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls, examines the impact of AIDS on the city’s dance life between 1981 and 1996 and includes performances by Neil Greenberg, Bill T. Jones, Archie Burnett, Mariana Valencia, Raja Feather Kelly, Katy Pyle, Narcissister, DANCENOISE, Antonio Ramos, Brother(hood) Dance!, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Ni’Ja Whitson, Jonathan Gonzalez, and Jasmine Hearn, as well as screenings, readings, discussions, vigils, and more. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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This program honors Jean Erdman, an avant-garde choreographer and theater director who recently turned 100 and who, with her husband, Joseph Campbell, explored archetypal themes through modern dance. On the schedule are her rarely seen 1942 solo, The Transformations of Medusa, performed by former Graham soloist Christine Dakin; a filmed adaptation of her 1948 Hamadryad by Nancy Allison and Paul Allman; Gloria McLean dancing a section of Erick Hawkins’s Black Lake; and a showcase of contemporary works inspired by myth. All this also celebrates the sixtieth year of the American Dance Guild, which helped to shepherd modern dance into the educational mainstream. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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Bill T. Jones, who runs his own New York Live Arts space around the corner, moves to the larger precincts of the Joyce for this double feature of two sections of his recent Analogy Trilogy. The first part, Dora: Tramontane, focuses on the story of Jones’s mother-in-law, the French Jew Dora Amelan, who survived the atrocities of World War II working as a nurse. The new second section, Lance: Pretty a/k/a the Escape Artist, reveals the struggles of Lance T. Briggs, Jones’s nephew, with drugs and other demons of youth. Both parts draw on movement, text, and singing. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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Dance-world talents David Vaughan (for decades the archivist of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as well as a critic and an urbane cabaret performer himself) and Pepper Fajans (an artist and entrepreneur currently running Brooklyn Studios for Dance) are joined by Cunningham and Tharp alumna Holley Farmer and actor-dancer David Neumann in Co. Venture. An award-winner at last year’s Montreal Fringe Festival, the piece incorporates sculpture, puppetry, and storytelling. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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More than 35 years after its appearance at BAM, Lucinda Childs’s Dance — here presented with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and fronting film décor by artist Sol LeWitt — remains an icon of dance minimalism, lush and formal and irresistibly rhythmic. (Members of the original audience, many of them performers themselves, reproduced the choreography outside in the snow after the show.) It plays nightly in the second week of this two-week run; the first is devoted to Lucinda Childs: A Portrait (1963–2016), a retrospective of Childs’s five-decade career, ranging from her witty work with the Judson Dance Theater to the New York premiere of her new piece, The Sun Roars Into View. — Elizabeth Zimmer

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More than just a dance troupe, the AAADT is a conglomerate — and the aspirational peak of many a young dancer’s career. This five-week season unveils a new work by Hope Boykin inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and brings all three installments of Kyle Abraham’s trilogy Untitled America. Mauro Bigonzetti shows us Deep, which blends European, American, and African cultures to music by Ibeyi, and Swedish choreographer Johan Inger offers the company premiere of Walking Mad, his 2001 take on Ravel’s Bolero. Then, of course, there’s a handful of Ailey classics, including the 1969 Masekela Langage and the earlier masterwork Revelations, the latter showing at 27 of this season’s 37 performances. On December 11, 15, 17, and 21, all the new stuff comes at you at once; on December 14, see a whole evening of works by Ronald K. Brown. — Elizabeth Zimmer

Film

Critic's Pick: The Wonder Years

Sorcerers from film studios of all sizes have long declared autumn as “serious” motion-picture season. But repertory moviegoing in New York is a heady pursuit no matter the month. Metrograph looks back on an especially fertile decade of LGBTQ films with “Queer ‘90s”(begins October 5, 7 Ludlow Street, metrograph.com). Multiple shades of lavender dominated both the art house and the multiplex during these years, this expansive series reminds us: The retrospective includes not only such New Queer Cinema landmarks as Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991) and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) — films that are radical in both form and content — but also low-camp, high-slapstick blockbusters like Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage (1996). Basic Instinct, one of the most divisive titles in the Metrograph program (at least at the time of its 1992 release; both GLAAD and Queer Nation called for protests), can be seen in a different context when it screens alongside the other works of its maker: The Film Society of Lincoln Center mounts “Total Verhoeven”(November 9–23, 65th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, filmlinc.org), a tribute timed to the release of the Dutch provocateur’s latest, Elle, a bewildering rape-revenge movie starring Isabelle Huppert that may prove to be a bigger succès de scandale than the one starring Sharon Stone. Another watershed work from the Nineties, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), returns, in a 2K restoration, for a revival run beginning November 18 at Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, filmforum.org), where it first premiered. This dreamlike, sonically and visually lush project about several generations of Gullah women at the turn of the twentieth century inspired Beyoncé, who lovingly salutes it in Lemonade. The film’s rerelease guarantees a new generation of superfans to share her devotion. — Melissa Anderson

Fall Film Listings

Considering the plethora of slapstick and talkie comedians who populated screens at the turn of the Thirties, the supremacy of theMarx Brothers seems almost like blind luck. But their four-person act exploited the specific comic stylings of each character — mustachioed and double-entendre-dropping Groucho, sly dimwit Chico, straight man and romantic lead Zeppo, silent prankster Harpo — giving all stripes of audience members a slice of their preferred humor. Film Forum’s one-week celebration of the quartet shows them off in their studio classics (A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races) while also putting them in the context of the other vaudeville-to-Hollywood stars of the time, as programmer Bruce Goldstein presents additional rarities from this early Vitaphone era. — Peter Labuza

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Henry Hathaway

October 3–15

Film Society of Lincoln Center, 65th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, filmlinc.org

Much of the anticipation for this year’s New York Film Festival centers on the premieres of the fall’s hottest titles, but programmer Kent Jones has also stashed a twelve-film sidebar retrospective of a Hollywood craftsman who doubled as a landscape artist. A contract director at 20th Century Fox for most of his career, Henry Hathaway combined tight narratives of masculine egos on the line with expertly crafted location work. In Niagara (1953), Hathaway turns a Marilyn Monroe–starring domestic nightmare into an epic showcase for the eponymous falls; in Spawn of the North (1938), the brotherhood between George Raft and Henry Fonda becomes dwarfed by Alaskan glaciers falling into the sea. Hathaway’s travelogues ventured from the Ozarks to Tepotzotlán to Lower Manhattan, combining great stories with the spectacle of place. — Peter Labuza

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Kelly Reichardt’s Sundance hit, an intersecting tale of three women in a working-class milieu, moves away from her recent genre-oriented work (Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves) and back toward the slice-of-contemporary-Americana vein where she made her name. Shot in Montana’s pastoral but harshly arid landscapes in grainy 16mm, Certain Women finds Reichardt adapting — with a cast that includes Laura Dern, Lily Gladstone, and Michelle Williams — three tales from Maile Meloy’s short-story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. An added bonus is another appearance by beloved thespian Kristen Stewart, here as a lawyer who finds herself untenably drawn to Gladstone’s ranch hand. — Peter Labuza

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After an exhausting summer of over-digitized, overserious blockbusters, this back-to-basics Tom Cruise action flick may provide a much-needed lesson in the pleasures of simple ass-kicking. Jack Reacher(2012), though enjoyable, did not exactly cry out for a sequel, but the ever-ebullient Cruise’s return as the superspy — here working alongside Cobie Smulders to uncover a government conspiracy — is hardly an unwelcome proposition. The wild card in this New Orleans–shot production is director Edward Zwick, a capable action craftsman who has often been trapped in historical stories of pointless pomposity. (Including one with Cruise, The Last Samurai.) Perhaps a down-to-earth, bayou-flavored B movie will be the jolt of energy that kick-starts a new chapter in Zwick’s career.— Peter Labuza

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Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy quietly shook audiences in 2008 with its thought-provoking depiction of a one-day romance between two African Americans. Jenkins’s long-awaited follow-up finally arrives in what aims to be another tale of black identity free of political grandstanding. The focus here is on a young man who struggles with his gay identity in inner-city Miami over three periods of his life, from childhood to adulthood. Jenkins’s patience creates drama out of small moments and elliptical passages (the imagery of Florida heat by director of photography James Laxton looks particularly enticing) that should help humanize a kind of individual all too often missing from our movie screens.— Peter Labuza

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The programmers at BAMcinématek have always found ways to combine the most esoteric of cinematic subgenres into a standalone program, and this season’s Halloween-themed “13 Cats” is no exception. The series offers felines in their most mysterious roles: Some of these will appeal to children, like a pair of works by the Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki; others — the Dario Argento–Harvey Keitel short “The Black Cat,” which features numerous Poe references, and Edgar G. Ulmer’s similarly titled The Black Cat, featuring a Karloff-Lugosi pair-up — will require more scream-resistant audiences. Also not to be missed: a chance to see Jacques Tourneur’s and Paul Schrader’s versions of Cat People back to back, each showing off different eras’ masculine response to dangerous womanhood. — Peter Labuza

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Jeff Nichols has made a career out of genre pictures with a certain Southern specificity. His first 2016 release, Midnight Special, evolved into a science fiction spectacular, after starting from a place and time of dimly lit highway roads, wheezing cars, and motels with darkened drapes. Nichols here strives for something a little less niche by tackling the Loving couple (portrayed by the great character actors Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga), the pair behind the Supreme Court’s 1958 decision to ban anti-miscegenation laws. Nichols is not one for showy, easy dramatics; as the Voice’s Bilge Ebiri wrote of the movie during his Cannes coverage: “We get no broad cathartic moments — no great breakdowns, or speeches, or confrontations. By the end, though, don’t be surprised if your face is awash in tears.”— Peter Labuza

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After making two of the best contemporary American dramas of the new century — the poignant brother-sister study You Can Count On Me and the sweeping ingénue-in–New York City story Margaret — Kenneth Lonergan is back with a third critical darling. Manchester by the Sea, which features tremendous performances across the board (Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler), spins a yarn of familial strife in New England, drawing much of its power from Lonergan’s knack for intimately detailed dialogue: His words slowly capture moments of grandiosity without relying on pretentious cinematic gestures. Given the broad-strokes prestige projects that are all too common during the fall movie season, Manchester feels like the antidote. — Peter Labuza

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These days, movies about teenage girls coming of age usually involve some sort of fantastic beast or dystopian nightmare. So consider us excited for The Edge of Seventeen, from newcomer writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig and producer James L. Brooks (How Do You Know). Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) stars in this tale of an out-of-place high schooler who finds herself in an identity crisis when her best friend starts dating her older brother; meanwhile, her mother (Kyra Sedgwick) and a mentor teacher (Woody Harrelson) try their best to help her come into her own. The Edge of Seventeen clearly evokes the John Hughes comedies of the Eighties, but the exciting female talent both behind and in front of the camera gives this a chance to make a dated genre feel honest once again.— Peter Labuza

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Whether deservedly or not, Warren Beatty has always positioned himself as a renegade far removed from the studios that made him famous. It only seems right, then, that the writer-director-star would make a big-time return here as none other than the legendary multimillionaire movie mogul (and notorious recluse) Howard Hughes. (The last movie Beatty directed was Bulworth, in 1998.) Beatty’s Hughes fills the antagonist slot in this 1958-set tale about a contract starlet (Lily Collins, who played Snow White in Mirror Mirror) and a limo driver (Alden Ehrenreich, the comic delight of the Coens’ Hail, Caesar!) who fall for each other despite Hughes’s rule against intraoffice relationships. It’s hard to say whether this comeback will result in the work of a master or just plain disaster, but years of critical revisionism have been kind to many of Beatty’s most misguided projects (Ishtar, Dick Tracy), so the weirder, the better.— Peter Labuza

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Think of Italy in the Fifties and Sixties and you might find yourself imagining the sick souls of Antonioni’s mansions, the sad faces of Fellini’s streets. But the comedies of Dino Risi were among the most popular with local audiences during this era. MoMA here presents over a dozen new 35mm prints of one of the crucial players in the commedia all’italiana movement. Risi lampooned the powers of postwar Italy, skewering the high and low of every institution with the flashy help of many of the country’s biggest stars. Canonical hits like Poveri ma Belli (Poor, but Handsome, 1956) and Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962) cast romantic love triangles and battles of egoism underneath sun-drenched Italian vistas, but also look out for the street-life documentaries Risi made just after the war, which put his social critiques in context.— Peter Labuza

Food

Critic’s Pick: The Party Starts Here

“Sustainability matters to us on so many levels, from the products we serve to the employees that we take on to our rent checks every month,” partner Ennio Di Nino cheekily tells the Voice, speaking to the ethos he and chef-owner Adam Harvey will espouse at A&E Supply Co. (548 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, aesupplyco.com), their upcoming all-day market and restaurant in Gowanus. A coffee counter will open first, brewing up cups of Brooklyn Roasting Company java starting at 7 a.m. and offering pastries from local bakeries (including doughnut favorite Dough). The kitchen will also supply yogurt parfaits and steel-cut oatmeal — and, as the duo have “the commuting customer in mind,” it’s safe to say that a breakfast sandwich or two is on the horizon. The butcher shop will debut next, selling pastured poultry and various grass-fed cuts from Hardwick Beef, which sources its cattle from farms throughout Vermont. Harvey, a Top Chef Boston alum who hails from New York City, will incorporate many of those same meats into his eclectic menu at the emporium’s planned fifty-seat restaurant. At this final piece of his and Di Nino’s gastronomic puzzle, expect Mediterranean-influenced New American food, like raw beef sirloin tonnato with winesap apples, homemade headcheese, and brashly Southern-inflected chicken-nugget gnocchi. Diners may even have the opportunity to make special requests if they spot something in the butcher’s cold case that isn’t on the menu. When asked about the popular “farm to table” concept, Harvey dismisses it as a diluted one. “We’re calling this approach ‘farm to party,’ “ he assures. — Zachary Feldman

Fall Food Listings

abcV

Opens in September

38 East 19th Street, no website yet

Jean-Georges Vongerichten has always had more regard for vegetables than other chefs of his age and stature — evident on the menu at ABC Kitchen, where someone seeking red meat would have just one option, the cheeseburger. He’s taking it to the next level at abcV, though, where there won’t be a scrap of meat or fish in sight. The restaurant will focus entirely on vegetables and grains, with breakfast, lunch, and a to-go counter all set to launch before they start serving dinner. This will be the chef’s third collaboration with ABC Home, following Kitchen and Cocina, and one can expect that the fruitful partnership will continue to prove delicious. — Alicia Kennedy

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Every vegan knows the name Isa Chandra Moskowitz: Her cookbooks take up major shelf space, from the classic Vegan With a Vengeance to the seminal tome Veganomicon, written with regular collaborator Terry Hope-Romero. Because of this, everyone outside Omaha was extremely jealous when she opened Modern Love in the Nebraska city in 2014, serving up refined comfort food like seitan wings, mac & shews, and lemon lavender cheesecake. We’re finally getting our own Modern Love here in Brooklyn this month, thanks to the folks at MooShoes, who have had the Williamsburg building where it will be located in their family for years. (The MooShoes crew are also opening their own Orchard Grocer, a completely vegan shop, on the Lower East Side.) On Instagram, Moskowitz and her cooks have been testing such dishes as seitan chops with applesauce, brussels sprouts, and shiitake bacon, and a vegan surf and turf, so there’s a lot to be excited about. — Alicia Kennedy

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Gotham Market at the Ashland

Opens in October

590 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, no website yet

There’s seemingly no limit to the number of food halls this city can sustain. In Fort Greene, Gotham West Market, which has run a Hell’s Kitchen hall since 2014, has set up camp on the ground floor of the Ashland, a luxury high-rise at Ashland Place and Fulton Street. On offer in the space will be Mu Ramen, Apizza Regionale, Flip Bird, the Southern-focused Mason Jar, a rotating pop-up space, and four other yet-to-be-determined spots. If you were hoping for more dining options around BAM before a movie or show, you’re now in luck. — Alicia Kennedy

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Lalo

Opens in October

104 Bayard Street, no website yet

El Rey Coffee Bar & Luncheonette was quite the hot spot when it opened in 2013, serving porkless chicharrones, spicy papas bravas, and a shockingly perfect kale salad. Then chef Gerardo Gonzalez left this spring and announced his next venture: Lalo, in Chinatown, an old-school style lunch counter with a $15 prix fixe option. It seems the food will be as cheeky and Latin-inspired as we’ve come to expect from Gonzalez, with dishes like chorizo-and-hibiscus-stuffed squid, a “Brown Goddess Salad,” and roasted squash with shaved mojama, gomashio, lemon, and tahini. And though Gonzalez is delving further into the world of animal protein — no kale salad here — there will still be plenty of options for the meat-averse.— Alicia Kennedy

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Williamsburg’s got a new hotel, the William Vale, and it’s not playing around when it comes to food. The team the hotel’s owners are taking on to cover the dining at its in-house restaurant, rooftop bar, and pool? Andrew Carmellini and Noho Hospitality Group (of the Dutch, Locanda Verde, Bar Primi, and others), here making their first foray into Brooklyn. The Southern Italian restaurant, Leuca, is the most exciting part of the endeavor, offering “wood-fired coastal fare” for breakfast, lunch, and dinner services. Up on the 22nd-floor roof, the bar, Westlight, will focus on classic cocktails, with street-food-inspired bar snacks. — Alicia Kennedy

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Atla

Opens in November

372 Lafayette Street, no website yet

Enrique Olvera has gradually joined the ranks of Grant Achatz, Dominique Crenn, and René Redzepi as a chef whose name makes your ears perk up. Of course, they’ve all been featured on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, but you also can be assured that whatever they’re working on is going to receive a ton of attention — likely for good reason. Olvera entered New York City with Cosme in the Flatiron district in October of 2014, and his husk meringue filled with corn mousse began appearing, gorgeously cracked open, on the Instagram feed of every food obsessive in town. Now, at Atla, he’ll be serving a more casual Mexican menu for around 65 seats in Noho. The menu has yet to be determined, but fingers crossed for more affordable and accessible options. — Alicia Kennedy

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Restaurateurs with three Michelin stars don’t open up fast-casual restaurants every day, so it’s quite the event that Daniel Humm and Will Guidara — owners of Eleven Madison Park and the NoMad — will be going counter-style at their new place, Made Nice. It will be right next to the NoMad, offering meals in the $10-to-$15 range. The vegetable-focused menu should still have some fancy cachet, though, as it will be served on the same kind of tableware featured at their upscale spots. When another big-name chef, former Eleven Madison Park owner Danny Meyer, dipped a toe into fast-food waters to start Shake Shack in 2004, the hot dogs were made in the Eleven Madison Park kitchen. Let’s see if affordable-and-great-food gold can be struck twice. — Alicia Kennedy

Literature

A New Biography Shows How, a Century After Her Birth, Jane Jacobs Still Informs Our Vision of City Life

In 1961, a woman without any training in architecture or municipal design — without, in fact, a college degree — changed the way the world thought about urban renewal. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs presented, as her opening sentence famously announces, “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Denouncing the high-handed practice of slum clearance while cogently exploring design problems with a measured indignation, the plainspoken book offered an affirmation of city living, especially of living in New York, that both rattled and impressed the establishment. “In another age,” the Wall Street Journal proclaimed, “the author’s enormous intellectual temerity would have ensured her destruction as a witch.”

In his just-released biography of Jacobs, Eyes on the Street, Robert Kanigel writes that, for some, Death and Life “was near to a religious experience... after they read it, they were different. That henceforth they saw differently. That their Chicago or New York or Boston had been reshaped before their eyes, with a new balance as to what was important and what was not.”

In Kanigel’s telling, Jacobs didn’t set out to change the world. She became a revered metropolitan sage and activist largely through happenstance. In 1956, twenty-two years after the teenage Jacobs had first moved to New York from Scranton “to seek my fortune,” the owlish forty-year-old staff writer for Architectural Forum reluctantly agreed to speak at a Harvard conference on urban design. (She took the spot given to the magazine’s editor, who had decided to vacation in Europe instead.) Though terrified of public speaking, Jacobs managed to deliver a talk on a subject close to her heart: the callous redevelopment of diverse neighborhoods into places of bland conformity. “We are greatly misled,” she said in her conclusion, “by talk about bringing the suburb into the city.”

For the crowd of attending luminaries, it was like the shout calling the emperor naked. In the stuffy academic setting, her sincere, straightforward style was a hit. She received congratulations even from the New Yorker’s renowned architectural critic, Lewis Mumford, who would later recall his impression: “This able woman had used her eyes and, even more admirably, her heart to assay the human result of large-scale housing, and she was saying, in effect, that these toplofty barracks...were not fit for human habitation.” Her most famous work had its seed.

Over half a century after Death and Life’s publication, in a year that’s been celebrated for the hundredth anniversary of Jacobs’s birth, is her book still relevant? Certainly, many of its specific references are very much outdated — statistics from the late 1950s, blocks that have since drastically changed, laissez-faire parenting in her chapter on children. And as Kanigel points out in his biography, later critics have objected to the book’s narrow focus, knocking Jacobs for pretty much ignoring public transportation, infrastructure costs, powerful developers, class distinctions, and, most pointedly, racial disparity. But for Kanigel, the book’s wisdom transcends its text.

“Most people have never heard of Frederick Taylor, but his ideas have become part of the air that we breathe,” he tells the Voice, referring to the nineteenth-century efficiency expert whose theories are the basis of mass production, and who was the subject of Kanigel’s previous biography. “Jane isn’t quite there yet, but she almost is. You don’t need to talk about Death and Life. You talk about mixed use, about density, about activity on the streets at all times of the day.... It’s quite possible to find all sorts of faults with [her book], but there’s a fundamental line of capital-T Truth that runs through it that is current and present in the minds of planners and architects.”

For a refresher, Jacobs’s four tenets of that Truth (summarized here) are all about creating diversity: 1) A neighborhood must serve more than one function: mixed use. 2) Blocks must be short, to maximize the experience of variety. 3) The neighborhood must include old buildings in addition to new ones, to keep affordability reasonable for small businesses and help keep change gradual. 4) There must be a sufficient density of people for a social scene.

Evidence of the philosophy in New York, Kanigel suggests, lies in the decades-long growth of Brooklyn, where he grew up in the 1950s. His father’s electroplating business, on the second floor of a loft in Williamsburg near the Navy Yard, is long gone, “but replacing it is a strong and vibrant neighborhood.” As for the recent sprouting of towers in Brooklyn Heights and Prospect Heights, he says, “That’s the other side of it. When things get to be too ‘good,’ they often turn bad, which Jane talked about herself in Death and Life.” Turn to chapter 13 of Jacobs’s book, its title a perfect prophecy of the glitz spreading into today’s Brooklyn: “The Self-Destruction of Diversity.”

But Jacobs, Kanigel adds, “was not specifically and always against high-rises.” He describes a visit she once made to Hong Kong, where she observed that some people who lived in the city’s numerous towers “would set up mini-hotels in a couple of rooms, or little manufacturing businesses...and they functioned in a street-like way. Apparently it was something of a revelation for Jane.”

It may also come as a surprise that Jacobs wasn’t necessarily opposed to gentrification. Before the word was actually coined (in 1964), she all but promoted the notion when she wrote about improving drab Battery Park, calling for the addition of restaurants, a marine museum, an aquarium, and “glamorous” embarkation points for “pleasure voyages.” Later in life, when she was focusing on economics, Kanigel explains, Jacobs’s view was that “gentrification implies that the demand for a certain breed of urban life is greater than the supply...and what we need are more places that have the possibility of becoming a lively district.”

The publication of Death and Life brought Jacobs celebrity status — she received endless invitations to speak on panels, tour new developments, and lecture everywhere — but for New Yorkers of the time, it was her activism that crowned her the people’s champion. When she learned that her own neighborhood, the West Village, a mix of businesses and homes, had been labeled a slum and slated by the city for redevelopment — i.e., demolition and replacement with a housing-only district — Jacobs led the furious residents in a raucous effort to thwart the plan. A year of what Kanigel calls “relentless pressure” — petitions, letters, rallies, confrontations with the planning commission — finally forced Mayor Robert Wagner to withdraw the proposal.

The victory was galvanizing and led the protesters (with Jacobs as a guiding force) to submit their own improvement project, West Village Houses, a series of moderately priced five-story walk-ups along Washington and Bank streets that didn’t require the area’s evisceration. After a decade of political and financial delays, the buildings were finally completed in 1974, in a plain-brick style stripped down from the original design, disappointing Jacobs. “Architecturally undistinguished,” Kanigel admits, “but socially they work quite well.” Now a non-eviction co-op, the buildings still manage, as Jacobs intended, to connect residents with one another and with the street. A few businesses in ground-floor units add the flavor of “mixed use.”

Jacobs notched her most famous success when she triumphed over the mighty Robert Moses, bullheaded shaper of New York, who with typical insensitivity wanted to build an eight-lane expressway across downtown Manhattan that would have wiped out Little Italy, among other neighborhoods. “If you try to imagine that highway going down Broome Street,” Kanigel says, “cutting off Lower Manhattan from the rest, it would have been awful. No Soho. Literally no Soho. The scale and noise and clamor ruining the city.”

Recruited by a young pastor to oppose the monstrosity, Jacobs helped lead the battle, which went on for years. In 1968, at what was meant to be a rubber-stamp public hearing, she had one of her finest anti-establishment moments when — as recounted by Kanigel in his book — she called for the storming of the stage, an act that ended up unraveling and ruining the stenographer’s lengthy paper record. “That tape,” Kanigel writes, “its stenotype symbols parading down its length like ancient hieroglyphics, was the only record of the hearing, or so it abruptly struck Jane.” She screamed to the crowd: “There is no record! There is no hearing! We are through with this phony, fink hearing!” At which point Jacobs was arrested, bringing more attention and opposition to the project, and helping pressure Mayor John Lindsay to declare his own opposition a year later.

Though her successes at preserving neighborhoods, in both New York and Toronto (where she and her husband moved in 1968 to keep their sons out of the Vietnam War), are historic, the grand legacy of Jane Jacobs is in the humanizing of urban planning. Her sensible ideas about city life have become so culturally embedded that we can now call them obvious, as Mayor Bill de Blasio did back in May for a piece in the Daily News marking her birthday.

Still, for all the centenary events that have celebrated her importance — lectures, walking tours, a documentary, an opera, and a musical — Jacobs is at risk, these days, of becoming little more than a brand name. Near the end of his book, Kanigel writes, “Walkability, street life, diversity, mixed-use, and other ideas and words associated with Death and Life now verge on catchphrases, sometimes so thoughtlessly invoked as to mean nothing.” Indeed, developers’ claims of “mixed use” typically mean another collection of the same familiar chain stores. Small businesses vanish, and diversity metamorphoses into homogeneity. The major theme of Death and Life, gradual change, has been largely forgotten, at least in New York, subsumed under what Jacobs called “cataclysmic money” — shiny complexes such as Atlantic Yards, Hudson Yards, and One Vanderbilt, the giant tower that will cast Grand Central Terminal into shadow. What New York needs now, it seems, is a successor to Jane Jacobs — someone who can shock the system, shake up the planners, scream about phonies and finks, remind us that ordinary neighborhoods like Corona in Queens are still valuable, and help prevent big cities from becoming playgrounds for the rich.

— Robert Shuster

Critic’s Pick: Lost in Translation

As Jonathan Franzen once observed, everything about Nell Zink seems made up. After a homeless period, she worked in construction and then moved to Germany, where she lives still. She published her first book, The Wallcreeper, at age fifty as a needling provocation to Franzen, with whom she’d struck up a pen-pal relationship. (Stylistically, the two couldn’t be more different.) Zink’s latest, Nicotine(October 4, Ecco, 304 pp.), hits shelves this fall; it tells the extraordinary story of Penny Baker, the daughter of a South African tribeswoman and a Jewish shamanist. When her father dies, Penny inherits his home in Jersey City, which has been taken over by a band of pro-cigarette activists. Penny becomes enthralled with her visitors, but when she introduces them to her family, relationships become entangled in strange and upsetting ways. Get the book for its crackling prose and razor-sharp wit, but ready yourself for its blitzkrieg of startling imagery.

Also coming this fall is Invisible Planets(November 1, Tor Books, 384 pp.), a thirteen-story anthology of Chinese science fiction translated for the first time into English. Its translator and editor, Ken Liu, is the author of the acclaimed Dandelion Dynasty series, and the stories collected here echo his writerly interests in cultural diversity and the social consequences of totalitarian rule. Included is “The City of Silence,” Ma Boyong’s Big Brother–like vision of a future where the internet — and all its communications — are under government control. Xia Jia’s “Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse” invites us into a world dominated by machines, and the title story by Hao Jingfang travels to four different planets whose cultural traditions are influenced by their unique environments. It’s a vital collection for readers of both sci-fi and literature-in-translation. — Amy Brady

Fall Literature Listings

Like his 2011 horror-lit novel Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s new book is an action-adventure story with a determined protagonist fighting to survive. But The Underground Railroad already seems more harrowing, just by virtue of the setting: This isn’t a zombie-strewn dystopian future — it’s our own horrifying past. Cora, a slave who risks her life to escape, must navigate a literal underground railroad, rails and all, while pursued constantly by her captors. On this night, hear Whitehead talk about his inspirations for a novel that’s already been widely embraced by reviewers (and Oprah!). — Heather Baysa

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Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run

September 27

Simon & Schuster, 528 pp.

Rock ‘n’ roll autobiographies are a dime a dozen, but rock ‘n’ rollers like Bruce Springsteen aren’t. In Born to Run, by which we mean the Boss’s new book of that title, Springsteen tells his oft-mythologized story firsthand. It’s packed with all the tales of hard work, determination, and bootstrap-pulling that you’ve come to expect from the poet of Freehold. And indeed, even now, a lifetime of superstardom later, Springsteen manages to come off as relatable and almost aggressively blue-collar as he describes his Catholic childhood and early career on the Asbury Park bar scene. Read it to restore your faith in America, or at the very least New Jersey. — Heather Baysa

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Ali Smith: Public Library and Other Stories

October 4

Anchor, 240 pp.

Nearly two years ago, Ali Smith’s novel How to Be Both took the book world by storm and raked in a slew of prizes, for good reason. A time-hopping, gender-bending, chronologically interchangeable plot made it truly experimental in form while remaining emotionally accessible. Her new work, Public Library and Other Stories, is similarly inventive: a collection of short stories that revolves around libraries, both public and private, as institutions and as ideas. The stories are separated by interviews with readers and writers who share how libraries have shaped their lives and careers. It all amounts to a concise and entertaining work of literary activism, arguing for the importance of the library as an increasingly rare community space. — Heather Baysa

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Chloe Caldwell doesn’t have a gimmick, just honesty, and a whole lot of it. Honesty about attending an orgy, food addiction, acne, recording and later getting off to the aforementioned orgy, and just a general lack of direction in life. In I’ll Tell You in Person, her second collection of personal essays, she’s as intimate, meditative, and thoroughly unpretentious as ever, tackling the trappings of modern femininity: T.J. Maxx, off-brand chocolate, Craigslist, good sex, bad sex, and babysitting, to name a few. At this book launch, she hashes it out with fellow writer Ashley Ford. — Heather Baysa

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Emily Witt: Future Sex

October 11

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 224 pp.

The Avenue Q puppets were right: The internet is for porn. But why stop there? In the spirit of exploration, Emily Witt boldly swipes right on all the carnal pleasures technology has to offer — dating apps, screwing apps, sexting, and easy access to kinky or progressive subcultures. Her first book, Future Sex, is provocative, to say the least, but the journalist’s interest is more than just skin-deep. With a sense of humor and an appreciation for the weird beauty of it all, she takes a genuine look at our modern pursuit of human connection, noting its potential to inspire a newer, braver female sexuality. — Heather Baysa

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If anyone thinks women aren’t suited for STEM careers, then a) they’re not very good at thinking, and b) Sam Maggs has 25 examples that prove them wrong. In her new book Wonder Women, she sets her bespectacled sights on the forgotten geek girls of math, science, invention, espionage, and adventure. Her profiles are more than just fun, they’re genuinely astounding — it’s incredible more people don’t know about Noor Inayat Khan, the Indian-American World War II spy, or Huang Daopo, who basically invented the Chinese textile industry and revolutionized the way clothes are made. Fantastic illustrations by Sophia Foster-Dimino bring these pioneering women to life. Hear Maggs discuss the project with Jill Pantozzi, founder of The Nerdy Bird. — Heather Baysa

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More than 1.5 million views later, Brit Bennett’s essay “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People” holds up as a timely, thoughtful articulation of race in America, not to mention a welcome reassurance that people on the internet still read thoughtful articulations. Bennett’s first novel, The Mothers, goes deeper still. In a tight-knit black community in California, church matriarchs are set abuzz by a seventeen-year-old’s pregnancy and abortion over the course of one summer. Here Bennett discusses her story about family and race with author Angela Flournoy. — Heather Baysa

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At first, it’s difficult to imagine Jonathan Lethem setting his stories on an international scale: After The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and Dissident Gardens, we’re accustomed to an outer–New York City–borough scope. But Lethem’s characters are always larger than life, and Bruno Alexander, the hustler protagonist of A Gambler’s Anatomy, fits that bill. In Lethem’s newest, the backgammon champion with possible telepathic powers travels the world, winning a fortune until an ironic tumor threatens his life and life’s work. It’s a tale of personal ambition and existential queries, told through a series of bizarre, funny, and highly animated episodes. Lethem discusses the novel with poet and author Ben Lerner as part of the “Brooklyn by the Book” series. — Heather Baysa

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Many of us loveTwin Peaks for its lingering mystery; at the end of the day, the owls are not what they seem, and it’s very possible the red curtain might never get pulled back to reveal a wizard — or a dancing dwarf. But on the other hand, many of us crave answers like we crave a cup of hot black coffee and a slice of diner pie. While we anxiously wait for Showtime to get a move on, co-creator Mark Frost is expanding the mythology with The Secret History of Twin Peaks. Hear him read from the fictional text, and get that much closer to finding the Black Lodge. — Heather Baysa

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Book Riot Live aims to be an unconventional sort of book convention: a gathering for readers, by readers, to celebrate all our favorite parts of literary culture. Attend readings and panels, take part in discussions, games, and trivia, or shop around for new books and literature-themed swag at the weekend-long conference. The roster of guest speakers includes authors, illustrators, editors, podcasters, librarians, storytellers, and other industry specialists. Highlighted performers like Phoebe Robinson, Mara Wilson, and Tara Clancy are sure to entertain. — Heather Baysa

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Swing Time, Zadie Smith’s new novel, begins in North West London, where the author was born and still lives today. Maybe that’s part of the reason she’s able to depict childhood friendship so tenderly yet realistically — the two girls at the center of the story ultimately grow up and fall out of touch, but they never forget each other. They’re both dancers; one hones her craft while the other works conceptually, using music and rhythm to explore blackness and community. Hear Smith discuss this ambitious new work. — Heather Baysa

Music

Contemporary pop culture teems with unfiltered first-person narratives and cathartic self-exposure, from search-engine-optimized “it happened to me” essays to the highbrow family memoirs of authors like Maggie Nelson. At its worst, the form is trashy; at its best, it can convey ideas that extend far beyond the confessor, tapping into something both intensely intimate and universally political.

The avant-garde Norwegian singer Jenny Hval pulls off this feat with a rare grace, layering prose poems, both spoken and sung, over synths, pulsing house rhythms, and noise-rock fuzz. Where Hval’s last studio album, Apocalypse, Girl, served as a withering feminist commentary on the sexual politics of American consumer culture (sample lines: “I beckon the cupcake/The huge capitalist clit”; “I grab my cunt with my hand that isn’t clean”), Blood Bitch, out September 30, deconstructs the menstrual cycle, the aging body, and the symbiotic relationship between lovers, vampires, and prey.

“Before [we decided on] vampires as a theme, blood was more the concept — in one sentence it can mean a severed limb, in the next it can mean menstruation,” Hval says via Skype from Oslo, where she is preparing for a U.S. tour. (She performs at Le Poisson Rouge on September 30.) The result of her exploration is deeply personal. “I think there’s a lot of potential in the confession that’s happening on social media, but I’m not interested in confessing anything in particular,” she says. “It’s more about the act of giving, and how that feels — how I desire others to feel about it.”

At 36, Hval has already mastered the art of making her listeners uncomfortable, with graphic references to sex and the body delivered in a hypnotic, feminine alto that’s impossible to ignore. Now she seems ready to break new ground. “Everyone talks about Jenny’s music being explicitly feminist or concerned with being a female,” says Zia Anger, an American filmmaker who’s worked with Hval on several music videos. “But her work, to me, first and foremost reads as an experiment with pop culture. This is supposed to be pop music, but she’s subverting our experience of it.”

Hval says she’s always felt somehow “other.” She started her musical career as a teen goth-metal singer, then sang in a couple of folk and rock bands while studying creative writing and performance in Australia in her twenties. She eventually developed her current arty style on two records released under the pseudonym Rockettothesky. Her songwriting has retained an experimental, conceptual quality — think Björk meets Dry-era PJ Harvey in a graduate theory seminar —but on Blood Bitch she reveals herself as a more nuanced artist, less interested in shocking us with tales of soft American bananas and various uses for her electric toothbrush (much-cited topics from her last album) than in setting a contemplative mood.

Blood Bitch also has a sprawling, cinematic quality, which makes sense, since, according to Hval, “very simple, badly made, cheaply made horror and vampire films from the Seventies” were on heavy rotation during the album’s recording. “I love this lo-fi filmmaking where every location looks like a hotel room,” she says. The budgetary and spatial constraints of these films, she adds, can actually spark creativity: “The ‘I don’t care if the [fake] blood is pink today’ attitude...appeals to me because it drives you to make stuff with its manic energy.”

That energy comes through clearly in conversation with Hval: She speaks in a flurry of sentence fragments, and her curiosity seems insatiable. Hval’s reading list wouldn’t be out of place on an n+1 editor’s bookshelf in Brooklyn. “I’m trying to get through The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson,” she says. “I love Chris Kraus. Anne Carson was a huge influence on me when I was nineteen. And when I’m onstage, I think of an Eileen Myles poem: ‘I have a confession to make/I wish there were/Some role in society/I could fulfill/I would be a confessor.’ “ She adds, “I feel like a confessor onstage, but I feel like it’s a creative confession.”

Hval’s brand of feminism, then, feels very of the moment. Nelson’s The Argonauts, a bite-size amalgam of personal history and theory, was widely cited as one of last year’s finest books; Myles and Kraus have both enjoyed a resurgence in popularity after younger feminist thinkers began to celebrate their willingness to go there, not just intellectually, but emotionally. Blood Bitch’s standout track, “Conceptual Romance,” borrows the term “abstract romanticism” from Kraus’s feminist classic, I Love Dick (recently made into an Amazon pilot by Transparent director Jill Soloway). “My heartbreak is too sentimental for you,” Hval sings on that track, echoing one of the points Kraus makes in her book: Over-the-top expressions of female emotion can be radical precisely because no one wants to hear them.

“I’m inspired by writers who combine a great respect for academic ways of thinking with a vulnerability and a respect for qualities in humans that have been considered female and shameful,” Hval explains. Some of her most powerful work has to do with taboos concerning women: She isn’t shy in her depictions of menstrual blood, for instance; one lyric memorably observes that periods smell like “warm winter.” But she acknowledges the frustrations of the first-person feminine role — both in art and in life — on a track entitled “Female Vampire”: “I’m so tired/Of subjectivity,” she sings. “I must justify/My presence by losing it.”

Blood Bitch was recorded in a single Oslo studio over the course of several months last year. Hval plays all the instruments on the album (she usually has multiple collaborators), and the only other person present was co-producer Lasse Marhaug, a noise musician and fellow Norwegian. (“We did a time lapse of a day in the studio,” Hval says wryly, “and it’s just two people looking into a computer screen.”)

The result is a collection of tracks that sound significantly bigger than the space in which they were conceived. “I think the one-room album allows for [expansiveness] because when you’re in that space it’s easier to find extremely focused energy,” Hval says. “Not having a lot of musicians’ input made it possible for me to go deeper and deeper into what I wanted with sound.”

You can hear this level of sophistication on such tracks as “The Plague,” which opens with a rattling drum, then segues into spooky poetry recited by Hval over a vampire-kitsch organ solo. Marhaug tells me over the phone that they added layers of sound and texture, in hopes of making the result as rich an experience as a movie. “If you listen closely you’ll be rewarded,” he says.

There are thematic layers as well. Blood Bitch ultimately reads as an exploration of growing older. “The vampire theme is about aging, but in a more existential way than looking at your body and wondering what to do about wrinkles,” Hval says. “This is about the endless body.”

Marhaug, who’s followed Hval’s career for years, says Blood Bitch could represent a turning point. “This is maybe her first album as an older artist,” he says. “There’s a freedom there. And I think her best albums are still ahead of her.”

“I’ve reached an ageless older stage which I quite enjoy,” Hval says of how she is perceived as an artist today. And yet, she adds, “I was always too old to be seen as young. I was never doing the type of music that was a young person’s lovely expression, so I just haven’t experienced that change.

“Or maybe,” she laughs, “I was always a vampire.”

— Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Critic’s Pick: Beyond Language

In 2002, Icelandic post-rock outfit Sigur Rós released their third full-length album, ( ). It was a groundbreaking work, not only for its alternately hymnlike and desolate compositions, but because it introduced a global audience to a language (or, really, non-language) of the group’s own invention: Vonlenska, or “Hopelandic.” Sigur Rós had already garnered buzz with the release of 1999’s Ágætis Byrjun thanks to frontman Jónsi Birgisson’s ethereal falsetto and wild bowed-guitar technique, but ( ) represented a creative zenith. Most of the songs that would appear on the record were workshopped on tour in between the recording of the two landmark albums; now, in an attempt to recapture that magic, Sigur Rós are hitting the road as a three-piece and scaling back drastically from the full-on, euphoria-inducing live orchestration — complete with brass and string ensembles — that characterized their most recent outings. A statement released by the band promises lots of “surprises” and loads of new material, but there will be plenty of time for beloved fan favorites, too — “Svefn-g-englar” (from Ágætis Byrjun), “Hoppípolla” (from 2005’s Takk...) — since they’ve opted to play two sets a night, beginning at 8:30 sharp, rather than book an opening act. In addition to trimming the lineup, they’re playing smaller venues than on their last tour, in 2013, which saw them visit Madison Square Garden following the release of the much moodier Kveikur. This time around, they’ll perform once at Radio City Music Hall (October 5, 1260 Sixth Avenue, radiocity.com), followed by two shows at Kings Theatre (October 6–7, Kings Theatre, 1027 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, kingstheatre.com), giving fans the opportunity to listen as their next masterpiece takes shape. — Lindsey Rhoades

Fall Music Listings

Those feeling under the weather might have to skip Adele’s epic six-night run at Madison Square Garden, now that the soulful singer has revealed that the entire crew of her massive world tour must undergo regular checkups to ensure they’re not coming down with any illnesses that could sideline her. It’s no wonder Adele is obsessed with keeping her pipes in top condition: Though her range is comparatively small, the emotional force and vocal athleticism she consistently delivers are key to the runaway success of megahits like “Rolling in the Deep” and “Someone Like You,” from her Grammy Award– winning breakthrough, 21. That’s to say nothing of the lead single from her latest LP, 25: “Hello,” a song so universally popular it’s been sung by everyone from the Muppets to the cast of SNL.— Lindsey Rhoades

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Kristina Esfandiari cut her teeth as the vocalist for Bay Area shoegaze act Whirr, but by 2014 she was working concurrently on two other projects: fronting doom quartet King Woman and releasing solo work under the name Miserable. Fans can expect Created in the Image of Suffering, the debut full-length from King Woman, early next year, but Miserable’s debut, Uncontrollable, has already arrived, featuring nine songs of seething despair that still manage to be achingly lovely. A serenity prayer of sorts, Uncontrollable sees Esfandiari struggling to find acceptance with the immutable, moaning huskily over reverby guitars and surreal electronic decay. Her stop at Alphaville isn’t just the culmination of her current tour; it also coincides with her relocation to Brooklyn, making it a housewarming of sorts — one likely to be more celebratory than the dire vibe of her music might suggest. — Lindsey Rhoades

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Classically trained on violin, Kaoru Ishibashi explored new ways to manipulate the instrument’s traditional sounds via loops, layers, and distortion on his first two releases as Kishi Bashi. Those records, 151a and Lighght, won acclaim for their soaring, orchestral indie-pop, but when Ishibashi attempted to pen similar material for a follow-up, his old tricks failed him. The solution, of course, was reinvention, and for Kishi Bashi, that comes in the form of Sonderlust, whose bright, disco-infused tracks get modern updates like eight-bit chiptune interludes and a daring flute solo (“Say Yeah”) and driving synths (“Can’t Let Go, Juno”). With a widened, refreshed palette, this eclectic genius embarks on a grueling tour schedule that stops at Webster in early October. — Lindsey Rhoades

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As one of the most successful non-English-language tracks in U.S. Billboard chart history, “99 Luftballons” catapulted German new wave band Nena to international acclaim. A poignant, tongue-in-cheek warning against warmongering governments, the track was Nena’s only hit outside of Germany, which contributed to the band’s demise just four years after the single’s 1983 release. But lead singer Gabriele Susanne Kerner continued to use the moniker — her childhood nickname — for solo releases, finally rekindling her chart success in 2002 by reworking her biggest Eighties hits for Nena feat. Nena. She’s toured across Europe with seemingly boundless energy, releasing over a dozen albums and live recordings, but shockingly has never played New York City, even during the band’s heyday. That will change with her tour for Oldschool, her seventeenth studio album, a jolting package of pop-rock anthems. — Lindsey Rhoades

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As the U.K. exploded with racial tension during the early Eighties, a multicultural musical movement known as 2 Tone sprang up, combining Jamaican ska, protest punk, and rude-boy style. Along with bands like the Specials, Madness, and the English Beat, one of 2 Tone’s most successful acts was the Selecter — the name is a nod to Jamaican disc jockeys — thanks in large part to the ferocity of lead singer Pauline Black, who joined the band for their legendary 1980 debut, Too Much Pressure. With characteristic walking basslines, splashy brass, and playful organ, Too Much Pressure combines party music and politics with an urgency that still feels essential. On their current tour, the Selecter plan to play the LP live in its entirety as a reminder of the unity we have yet to achieve. — Lindsey Rhoades

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There’s not much that can stop Caetano Veloso. Imprisoned and then exiled at the start of his career, he nevertheless pioneered a genre known as tropicália, a mesmerizing fusion of traditional Brazilian music with Sgt. Pepper psychedelia and avant-garde rock ‘n’ roll. Along with Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, and others, Veloso was demonized by the Brazilian dictatorship and its conservative followers for daring to allow outside influences, particularly from the United States, to corrupt the nation’s heritage. But as his reputation grew internationally, Veloso was hailed as a revolutionary who never shied away from making bold sociopolitical statements. Now in his seventies, Veloso remains prolific, having released Abraçaço in 2013 and, earlier this year, an exultant album of duets with lifelong friend Gil. The pair played BAM recently, and Veloso returns to New York this fall for a set of solo shows at the Town Hall. — Lindsey Rhoades

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With little more than a three-song EP, KING established themselves as r&b’s next big thing as soon as it dropped in 2011, earning early praise from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Questlove, and Prince. But the release of a proper debut was not as instantaneous as the initial acclaim: Though a full-length was initially slated for 2014, We Are KING didn’t arrive until earlier this year. Luckily, the wait was worth it, giving twin sisters Paris and Amber Strother and their cohort Anita Bias ample time to smooth every wrinkle in their smoldering vocals. Backed by impressionistic instrumental flourishes, the trio exudes an uncommon warmth while embodying the epitome of chill. Lounging somewhere between neo-soul contemporaries like Erykah Badu and ultra-hip innovators like Blood Orange, KING are set to rule for a long time to come.— Lindsey Rhoades

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Unwittingly anticipating the birth of Kraut-rock and all but inventing avant-garde electronica, Simeon Coxe and Danny Taylor’s wildly experimental East Village duo, Silver Apples, broke many a mold. Their self-titled 1968 debut and the next year’s follow-up, Contact, hinged on the ruckus made by Coxe’s hand-built oscillators but were paced by Taylor’s trancelike drumming. Bootleg recordings that surfaced in the Nineties resurrected the duo’s career from relative obscurity, prompting the release of lost LP The Garden and spawning several successful tours. After Taylor’s death in 2005, Coxe kept Silver Apples alive as a solo project; on this year’s Clinging to a Dream, the band’s first release since 1998, he culls odd blips and loops from his improvised machines, forging an excellent reminder of Silver Apples’ immeasurable influence on psychedelic experimentation. — Lindsey Rhoades

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With their kitschy blend of J-pop and video game sound effects, London-based trio Kero Kero Bonito tap into the sugary proclivities of Tumblr culture, setting it all to an irresistible club beat. Producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled cast a neon backdrop for the cartoonish glee of vocalist Sarah Midori Perry (who raps in both English and Japanese and was discovered by Lobban and Bulled through an online bulletin board) on Intro Bonito, their addictive mixtape. After two sold-out CMJ appearances last fall, KKB return for their biggest New York show yet, less than two weeks after the release of their debut album, Bonito Generation, which compiles manic singles “Picture This,” “Lipslap,” and “Break,” along with nine new tracks sure to initiate an immediate endorphin rush. — Lindsey Rhoades

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Twin sisters and LGBTQ activists Tegan and Sara Quin attracted a fiercely loyal following early on, one that’s stuck with them through multiple phases: their humble beginnings as folksy Canadian sister act; their indie-pop transformation and 2004 breakout, So Jealous; and their near-demise as stardom-begotten infighting tore them apart during a grueling tour behind 2007’s The Con. Two albums later, on Heartthrob, Tegan and Sara officially rebranded themselves as pop stars, enjoying the massive commercial success of single “Closer” and a supporting spot on Katy Perry’s Prismatic North American Tour. With follow-up Love You to Death, the duo continue on a triumphant pop trajectory, at last addressing their once-strained relationship and fearlessly penning anthems for the queer-identified fans who’ve supported every iteration of their hard-won successes. — Lindsey Rhoades

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He’s been hailed as a purveyor of clever wordplay and a veritable pop encyclopedia, known for his ability to shift easily between new wave, soul, and country. Now Elvis Costello will headline a tour dedicated to 1982 opusImperial Bedroom, his ambitiously arranged seventh studio album. Brimming with unique instrumental flourishes and adroit orchestration, the LP saw the English crooner hone an artful pop vision propelled by the range of genres he’d dabbled in on albums prior. This latest tour announcement comes as Costello continues his solo “Detour” outing with Larkin Poe, which rolls through New York on October 1 with a stop at the Town Hall. By contrast, the November Beacon dates will feature backing band the Imposters, with three longtime collaborators — bassist Davey Faragher, drummer Pete Thomas, and keyboardist Steve Nieve — who know just how to interpret the whimsy and wonderment that made Imperial Bedroom one of Costello’s most resounding victories. — Lindsey Rhoades

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John Dwyer’s longest-running vehicle has been Thee Oh Sees, initially a solo project that solidified around the venerated lineup of Brigid Dawson, Petey Dammit, Mike Shoun, and Lars Finberg, now a revolving cast of Bay Area rockers churning out his raucous, psychobilly-inflected punk. In 2013, cross-Cali migration effectively put the band on hiatus, but Thee Oh Sees didn’t stay dormant for long, releasing Drop and Mutilator Defeated at Last in 2014 and 2015, respectively. With this year’s A Weird Exits, featuring double drummers Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon alongside bassist Tim Hellman, a new era feels imminent. Though there are plenty of spacey, psychedelic jam-out moments on the LP, Exits is one of Thee Oh Sees’ most rock-oriented offerings in years, imbued with the reckless energy that makes the group a must-see live. — Lindsey Rhoades

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Aging gracefully can be tough, especially in an industry obsessed with youth. Leave it to Stephin Merritt, founder of baroque-pop legends the Magnetic Fields, to reach his fifties with idiosyncratic aplomb. Taking a cue from the conceptual impulse that made sprawling albums like 69 Love Songs so endearing and cohesive, Merritt will present the Magnetic Fields’ newest record, 50 Song Memoir, over two nights at BAM, with unique setlists each evening. The LP, which won’t be out until early 2017, features one autobiographical track for each year of Merritt’s life, delivered with his characteristic wit and unmistakable baritone. The multi-instrumentalist has recruited seven musicians to interpret the work live, performing against a backdrop of custom set pieces that correspond to Merritt’s fanciful narrative. Were he not a master of mirthful self-flagellation, Merritt might be branded a narcissist; instead, we’ll raise a glass and toast another year for the patron saint of self-deprecating songwriting. — Lindsey Rhoades

Theater

Pulitzer Winner Suzan-Lori Parks Kicks Off a Season of Her Cathartic Plays at the Signature

“I say you’re either part of the problem or part of the power — what do you want to be?” asserts Suzan-Lori Parks. “Art is a force for cultural change.”

The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright has recently returned to New York from London, where she was rehearsing Father Comes Home From the Wars, her Civil War drama inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. Now she sits at a table at her favorite Greenwich Village diner, coffee cup in hand, paused mid-sentence. The pause doesn’t last long. It’s one of many throughout our conversation, each like a rest between musical phrases. When she continues, it’s to clarify her point: “But it’s a big culture and a lot of things need work.”

Like culture and its problems, Parks’s plays, which have been staged professionally since at least the late Eighties, resist easy categorization. They are at once explicitly political and psychologically complex. Consider The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, which opens in revival October 25 at the Signature Theatre, where Parks is this season’s Residency One Playwright, an honor previously bestowed upon David Henry Hwang, Sam Shepard, Paula Vogel, and August Wilson. Racially provocative, the play assails stereotypes: Two hyper-symbolic leads — Black Man With Watermelon and Black Woman With Fried Drumstick — experience multiple deaths over the course of centuries, revealing how African-American history has been contorted, oversimplified, or left completely out of America’s historical narratives. Its rapid dialogue between characters — eleven in all — sounds more like scatting than conversation as it coheres into a helix of half-words and jazz-tinged utterances:

Black Woman: How uhbout uh hen leg?

Black Man: Nothanks. Justate.

Black Woman: Just ate?

Black Man: Thatsright. 6 by 6 by 6 Thatsright.

When the play premiered at BACA Downtown in 1990, the set featured gravestones and a large watermelon that Black Man would pick up and polish like a boot. Parks eagerly explores images that other playwrights steer clear of.

Set to a score that draws from jazz and African motifs, the play is also an intimate tale of grief and mourning, an examination of how music and storytelling can be used to form cathartic reconnections with one’s past. Frequently, Black Man’s memories (“I jumped in thuh river without uh word. My kin are soppin wet”) are picked up and elaborated on by others (All: “Thuh river was roun as thuh worl was. Roun”). In these moments it’s as if they share a hope that their recollections might make known, if only for a moment, a wisp of their ancestors’ unrecorded history.

In 2016 in particular, these themes of connection still resonate. “It’s actually a great time in our culture,” says Parks. “We’re asking ourselves what we mean to each other. And, yeah, sometimes the answer is ‘you’re nobody.’ There are people getting shot in the street for doing absolutely fucking nothing, while other people who are deemed more promising are getting slapped on the wrist for committing a horrible crime. So we’re dealing with stuff, but [at least] we’re asking questions.”

Though Parks acknowledges that her plays speak to America’s present-day race problems, she’s wary of her work being reduced to a thesis statement. “Some writers choose an issue, paint it all one color,” she says, “and that’s fucking boring.” She also argues that such simplistic messages give a false representation of what life is actually like. “It’s true that African-American history has moments of tragedy and contention. But if you slow it down, you find this field of possibility where all things can happen.”

Parks’s ability to perceive life’s complexities has certainly contributed to her success as a dramatist — critics have long praised her plays for their layers of meaning and genre-crossing structures. But that success may also be rooted in received wisdom from her father. Born at Fort Knox in Kentucky, Parks was told repeatedly to “work your luck,” a mantra meant to remind her that good things happen to people who work hard for them. It’s a mantra, she says, that helped her father, a black man who came of age in the segregated 1940s and ‘50s, build a successful career in the Army.

As an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College, Parks found her hard work earning the attention of James Baldwin, who was teaching there at the time. He read her stories and encouraged her to become a playwright. Two years after graduating in 1985, she staged her first professional play in New York City. Four years later, she won her first Obie, for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Kingdom, a poetic condemnation of the culture’s leering fascination with black bodies. Four years after that she won her second, for Venus, which premiered at the Public Theater in 1996.

Parks has maintained her relationship with the Public ever since. In 2001, the downtown theater staged Topdog/Underdog, about two African-American brothers named Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth; the play won her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making her the first African-American woman to receive that award. Today, she serves as the Public’s Master Writer Chair and stages free performances at the theater called Watch Me Work, in which Parks sits at a table in front of an audience while she works on her latest writing project. Audience members are encouraged to bring writing projects of their own to create a shared work space. At the end of each performance/writing session, Parks spends fifteen minutes answering audience members’ questions about her approach to writing and art more generally. She likes to discuss, too, the relation between audiences and what they witness on the stage.

Parks acknowledges that Watch Me Work irked critics when it premiered: “They were like, ‘Who does she think she is?’ “ But the critical blowback has had little effect on her willingness to continue: She’ll revive the project this fall, and most likely, audiences will continue to join her. It’s become something of a master class for those in attendance.

Part of the instructive power of theater, says Parks, is a function of its geometry. “When a child is small, so much of what they understand of the world is received through information given to them by their primary caregivers,” she explains. “And they receive that information by looking up at them at this angle.” She puts down her coffee cup and tilts her hand to roughly forty-five degrees. “That angle is powerful; it shapes our world. It becomes the basis of our belief system. Now, when you sit in most theaters and look up at the stage, it’s at a similar angle. The people onstage are telling you how the world is, and it’s important to provide opportunities for people to see themselves reflected.”

The act of looking is especially complicated in Venus, the second of her plays to be produced by the Signature this season. Premiering April 25, it’s based on the tragic, true-life story of Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman, a black woman living in nineteenth-century South Africa who was lured to England and forced to exhibit her naked body in a freak show. One of its most fascinating scenes runs through intermission. The house lights come up, and a character called Baron Docteur encourages the audience to leave before he conducts an excruciating analysis of Sarah’s body.

As I ask the playwright about this moment, a waiter with musical notes tattooed around his forearm stops to ask if we’d like more coffee. Parks eyes his ink: “Hey man, are you a musician?” He nods, saying that he plays the guitar but isn’t very good. “But you’re getting better all the time, right?” she asks. He smiles and nods enthusiastically before walking away. When she turns back to me, she’s smiling too. “Here’s the thing,” she says. “I don’t confine my [political] activities to my work. I make sure each interaction is part of [my] political statement — I’m going to treat everyone with kindness.” Her answer is indirect, but then so are her plays.

It seems there are infinite opportunities for Parks to demonstrate kindness to others, or at least to create new art with them. When I ask about future projects, she lists jamming with her band, Sula and the Noise, whose music she describes as “urban folk” (and who will play September 19 at the Signature launch party), and writing a script for a new show on Amazon. (She worked on the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for ABC in 2005.) I offer that it must be difficult to manage so many projects at once, but she brushes my concern away with a wave. “I’m just glad that I can employ people and give [audiences] some things to think about for a few minutes,” she says. She falls into one of those pauses. And then: “Or maybe even for a long time.”

— Amy Brady

Critic’s Pick: Not So Ordinary

How long would it take to tell your entire life story? In the hands of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, quite possibly seven years. The New York–based theater ensemble is currently presenting the final three installments of its epic, interdisciplinary performance project Life and Times, kicking off the annual live arts festival Crossing the Line (crossingthelinefestival.org). Life and Times, launched in 2009 and led by co-directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, narrates the story of company member Kristin Worrall, from her birth to age 34. What’s so special about Kristin Worrall? Everything and nothing. Life and Times is the story of an ordinary American life: the sights and sounds and smells of a suburban childhood, the travails of puberty, the angst of teenage friendships. The piece is told in Worrall’s words, culled from marathon interview sessions, and then transformed in wildly imaginative ways onstage, inhabiting the visual worlds of, say, Agatha Christie murder mysteries or sci-fi tales featuring extraterrestrials. Some installments depart from theater altogether: Episodes 4.5 and 5, detailing Worrall’s sexual coming-of-age, were presented as, respectively, an animated film and a hand-drawn, Kama Sutra–style book, which audiences read, seated together, in a dark theater. Episodes 7, 8, and 9 — playing this week, in their New York premieres, at the French Institute Alliance Française (September 22, 55 East 59th Street, fiaf.org) and Anthology Film Archives (September 24, 32 Second Avenue, anthologyfilmarchives.org) — are films inspired by the aesthetics of Citizen Kane, early CinemaScope, and rap videos, among other forms. Been on the edge of your seat for seven years? Now’s your chance to see how it all turns out. — Miriam Felton-Dansky

Fall Theater Listings

In 1866, still licking its wounds from the Civil War, America invented the book musical when Charles M. Barras’s Faustian melodrama The Black Crook opened at Niblo’s Garden at the corner of Broadway and Crosby. The original spectacular was full-on bonkers, running north of five hours and featuring a saucy ballet troupe of seventy ladies. But while downtown never forgets, it also has a limited budget, so a band of experimenters (led by adapter-director Joshua William Gelb) has reimagined and shortened Crook, cramming it into the tiny downstairs space at Abrons. I can think of no better way to celebrate a form’s 150th birthday. — Helen Shaw

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New York Theatre Workshop opens its season with Nat Turner in Jerusalem, Nathan Alan Davis’s two-hander about a jailhouse conversation between the leader of a doomed slave rebellion and the attorney who would later tell his story. In a year in which Nate Parker’s screen portrait of Turner has dominated headlines, it’s a thrill to think we’ll see the same person played by Phillip James Brannon, a consistently bright light in plays like Love and Information and Bootycandy. Sometimes it’s a single man who leads you: Brannon’s presence makes this work necessary viewing. — Helen Shaw

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This season, the Roundabout puts Chekhov’s protosymbolist masterpiece The Cherry Orchard on Broadway, where its message about generational inaction and environmental exploitation will no doubt strike a plaintive chord. The production boasts an embarrassment of talent riches: Tony Award–winning playwright Stephen Karam (The Humans) adapts; splashy British helmer Simon Godwin directs; and the cast includes Diane Lane, mighty John Glover (so brilliant this summer in Troilus and Cressida), Celia Keenan-Bolger, and sweet Susannah Flood. And the cherry on top? Wunderkind composer Nico Muhly did the music. — Helen Shaw

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Any theater buff will tell you that community is the soul of live performance, and so it is with the extreme sense of togetherness engendered by Richard Nelson’s family dramas. Once again he gathers us around a family’s table for a trilogy: This fall, the Public Theater offers the second and third parts of his three-play cycle, The Gabriels. As it happens, the greatest strength of Nelson’s hyperrealist works (in the first part, someone really baked a pie) has been the company assembled for them. Every show, actors like Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett offer a master class in the art of openhearted listening — a good lesson for a year like this one. — Helen Shaw

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This comedy crushed it at the Cherry Lane, and based on the actual weeping fits people went into downtown, the folks uptown should be in stitches. Oh, Hello on Broadway starts its limited run (yes, on Broadway) in late September, so we’ve all got another chance to catch Nick Kroll’s and John Mulaney’s old-fogy alter egos, Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland, as they hold forth on matters pertaining to the Upper West Side, their own theatrical ambitions, and — we hope — the dangers of too much tuna. Director of the hour Alex Timbers is at the helm, ensuring what should be a sheen of professionalism over the cavalcade of intentionally terrible jokes and groan-inducing puns. — Helen Shaw

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For perfect period-specific melancholy, there has been no better company than the Mad Ones, the superb Off-Off-Broadway troupe that devised The Essential Straight & Narrow(heartbreak at a Seventies highway motel) and The Tremendous Tremendous (heartbreak at the 1939 World’s Fair). Now the team, which includes exquisite performers like Joe Curnutte, Marc Bovino, and Stephanie Wright Thompson, brings the tragicomic Miles for Mary to the Bushwick Starr, diving into the “camcorder” Eighties with all the deliciously terrible hair and jeans choices that implies. My hopes are as high as my newly sprayed bangs. — Helen Shaw

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The last time experimental-theater titan Robert Wilson teamed up with uber-danseur Mikhail Baryshnikov, it was for 2014’s bravura work The Old Woman. So it’s particularly exciting that the maestro of stillness — Wilson is known for crafting every photon of every light cue with excruciating care — has made another work for the greatest mover alive. The new Letter to a Man takes its inspiration from the schizophrenic crackup of Vaslav Nijinsky, the Ukrainian dancer-choreographer whose angular-erotic movement for The Rite of Spring inspired riots. Relatedly, BAM politely asks that you not tear up your seats, no matter how much the show arouses you. — Helen Shaw

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We wait a long time between solo shows from Anna Deavere Smith, the documentary-theater artist who made Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles. But the wait’s always worth it. For her brand of radical civic engagement, Smith dives deep into her topics, interviewing people far and wide, then performing them all as a kind of one-woman impact report. In Notes From the Field, Smith explores racism, the implications of our incarceration-obsessed system, and the school-to-prison pipeline. In her second act, she creates a facilitated discussion with the Second Stage audience — so if you’re not woke now, this’ll fix it. — Helen Shaw

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The Signature Theatre’s Suzan-Lori Parks residency (see “Matters of Life and Death,” page 30) starts with a bang: her 1990 jazz-influenced opus The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. For those audiences who know Parks from her most recent work, the relatively gentle Father Comes Home From the Wars, this earlier, incandescently strange work is going to strike like a thunderbolt. Positioned by the Great Hole of History, Black Man With Watermelon dies again and again as a chorus wonders, “Where he gonna go now that he done dieded?” Rage, minstrelsy, humor, lynching — it all roils in this cataclysm of a play, which promises to electrify the theatrical season. — Helen Shaw

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The peripatetic Amsterdam-based Ivo van Hove has been everywhere lately, from downtown with Lazarus up to Broadway with The Crucible. But even if those left you cold, you must rally your troops for Kings of War, another of van Hove’s marathon Bard-a-palooza events at BAM. Again, as with the magisterial Roman Tragedies, Toneelgroep Amsterdam crams together a bunch of Shakespeare histories (this time Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III); again, van Hove’s incomparable Dutch company charges through the modern-dress adaptations without a break. Yes, it’s four and a half hours, but this stuff is as exciting as programming gets. Once more unto the breach, you theatergoers, and close up your hunger with the handily purchasable snacks. — Helen Shaw